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Over the last week, I have gotten my word count up to 4000. Most of my writing so far has been primary source analysis of Anne Carson's Plainwater. My task for the coming week is to incorporate secondary source genre analysis regarding road trips and rites of passage. Additionally, I am hoping to do more comparative work between Carson’s work and that of Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, and other lesser known authors.

The biggest struggle I am having is just to write consistently day-to-day. I know I can finish this project and I am learning more each day that I am writing, but getting to the writing point is often difficult. But worry not! It will get done and it will be somewhat polished by the 20th.

MYTHIC AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK: Ritual and Liminality

Pilgrimage is a rite of passage. A rite of passage is an anthropological term for a ritual that passes the participant from one state of life into another. The most familiar rites of passage include ceremonies celebrating birth, coming of age, weddings, and death.[1] A ritualized setting condenses this transition of social identity into a single setting. A participant in a rite of passage goes through three stages: pre-ritual, liminality (or in the midst of the ritual), and post-ritual. In a chapter of her book Rituals: Perspectives and Dimensions, Catherine Bell explains how the elements of a rite of passage allow for the participant’s transformation, “[rites of passage] orchestrate a physical removal from the rest of the world, physical changes of appearance […] and basic conceptual changes in one’s sense of self.”[2]

Bell borrows this model of pre-ritual, betweenness, and post-ritual from folklorist and mythologist Arnold van Gennep, who created a similar paradigm for the process of initiation. Van Gennep’s steps for initiation are separation, liminality, and reincorporation.[3] This model has been borrowed not only for rites of passage, but also for travel narratives—particularly, for pilgrimage. Bell writes,

Setting out from home and a familiar world, the pilgrim endures the trials and tribulations of the journey, passes through strange lands to which he or she does not belong, and finally arrives at a place considered holier than others, a sacred center where wisdom or grace or gifts are dispensed. Securing a token of that dispensation, the pilgrim returns home bearing the transformed identity of one who has made the journey, touched the sacred objects, and received heavenly boons for effort.[4]

The act of pilgrimage, therefore, requires the pilgrim to enter into a state of transformation. During pilgrimage, a pilgrim communes with God, being changed from a previous self in the process. This fits pilgrimage into the framework of an initiation or rite of passage—moving the pilgrim from the pre-ritual self to the post-ritual self.

Anne Carson uses this discussion of the steps of ritual in framing the larger narrative of “The Anthropology of Water”, the section of Plainwater that contains the essay “Kinds of Water”, “Just for the Thrill”, and “Water Margins.” By titling the work “The Anthropology of Water”, Carson places herself within an anthropological discourse. She draws herself further into the camp of the anthropologist, the mythographer, and the folklorist through the introduction to this text, “Diving: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Water.” Here, Carson begins her work via a summarization of a discussion she has with an anthropologist and the introduction to anthropological vocabulary or, the delicacy of word choice. Carson focuses on the distinction between the words “encounter” and “discover” and how choosing the former is “the difference…between believing what you want to believe and believing what can be proved.”[5] This comment plays with anthropology’s concern for the unbiased through the ethics of word choice and mental framing. Anthropology requires an objective recounting of what is there, rather than fitting what is there into what one expects to find. Through the narrator’s response, “ ‘I don’t want to believe anything,’ I said. (But I was lying.) ‘and I have nothing to prove.’ (Lying again.) ‘I just want to travel into the world and stop, noticing what is under the sky.’ (This, in fact, is true.)”[6], Carson’s intentional plays on the expectation of the anthropologist and her narrator’s inability to perform the objective role. This inability to fulfill the role of the anthropologist (a maybe impossible role of only word play rather than reality) is what leads Carson’s narrator into the role of the mythographer, in which reality becomes displaced or mythologized through story.

“Diving” ends with the story of Danaos, an Ancient Greek hero who had 50 daughters. The daughters were connected to their father psychically, as when “Danaos stirred in his seep they would awaken, each in her narrow bed.”[7] When Danaos married off his daughters he “carried out the wedding ceremony” and then forty-nine of his daughters murdered their husbands in their beds.[8] That left one daughter, who Carson writes “remains to be discovered”, intentionally playing back on the ethics of word choice discussed earlier.[9]

The Danaos myth is the ur-myth for Carson’s stories throughout “The Anthropology of Water,” setting up a situation of sustained liminality (the between state of ritual) that is the state of her various narrators. An “ur-myth” is the most basic or first telling of a particular myth or mythic theme in a particular mythos. This myth tells of forty-nine daughters who refused to allow men to break their liminal state—as the wedding night completes the wedding ritual/rite of passage—and killed their husbands due to their devotion to their father. The daughters therefore remained connected primarily to their fathers. However, the fiftieth daughter who does not murder her husband, Hypermnestra, does not break her state of liminality either. Lyceneus, her chosen husband, honors her liminality by agreeing to allow her to remain a virgin and, therefore, not finalize their wedding ritual.

Liminality, or the middle period of a ritual, is the mode of each narrator in Carson’s “The Anthropology of Water.” During the liminal state, the participant experiences a dissociation from their previous identity and therefore enters into a period of identity-confusion. A state of non-identity and intentional disengaging with a previous identity, opens up the room for transformation. The ritual process usually guides the individual from this state of lack of identity into their emergence into their new identity. By choosing to start her three pieces with “Kinds of Water,” her pilgrimage narrative, Carson puts the state of ritual and liminality at the forefront of her longer works. This thread that begins in “Diving” then does not fade away, but remains clearly woven into the first story and, therefore, in the mind of the reader as they move onto “Just for the Thrill” and, eventually, “Water Margins.”

The lack of ritual and rites of passage may not follow into “Just for the Thrill”, a distinctly American road trip narrative, due to the general lack of rites of passage in American culture. Bell comments on this in her text, stating that “lack of clear life-passage rites in American culture has contributed to the loss of community and a growing sense of social alienation.”[10] While Carson’s narrator is transitioning into a state of womanhood throughout “Just for the Thrill”, there is no formal ritualized setting for her to move from androgynous youth to woman. However, given the ritual of the pilgrimage in “Kinds of Water” and the similar states of questioning, alienation, and transformation, one can conclude that the narrator in “Just for the Thrill” is on an analogous ritual path.

While neck-deep in the state of liminality, Carson’s narrators often attempt to take on an observer’s role to their own experiences. This dual nature of the objectivity of anthropology and the liminality of the myth of Hypermnestra in “Diving” frames the push-pull of Carson’s narrators who she describes simultaneously in the roles of the observer and the actor. She frames the pilgrimage in “Kinds of Water” simultaneously through diary entries and describing the sharing of photographs. The narrator takes on the role of the photographer, a role necessarily of observation. The dual role of the narrator as both actor and observer comes through these dual forms of discussing the journey—both first-hand descriptions that are written in a stream-of-consciousness style and the sharing (and taking) of photographs.

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[1] Catherine Bell. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997: 94.

[2] Bell, Ritual, 95.

[3] Bell, Ritual, 95.

[4] Bell, Ritual, 104.

[5] Anne Carson. Plainwater. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1995: 117.

[6] Carson, Plainwater, 117.

[7] Carson, Plainwater, 118.

[8] Carson, Plainwater, 118.

[9] Carson, Plainwater, 118.

[10] Bell, Ritual, 101.

Retreat (quiet, quiet, quiet)

On Saturday afternoon, I left Canterbury Court and drove down to my childhood home in Lemont, a southwest suburb of Chicago.

I did not realize how much I had missed silence until I was tucked into my bed and could hear nothing other than the sound of my own breath. My house has never been loud--it's a comment that other friends with siblings often make when they come to visit. Now that everyone but my parents have moved on with their lives, the quiet is so pervasive it feels like life on the edge of movement. The only thing that occasionally separates out time is the clicking of my dog's nails down the hardwood hallway, though most of the time he is curled away in some warm corner (as fourteen year old dogs do.)

Going outside, the sound is wind and leaves and the occasionally chirp and flutter of a bird taking off. The geese honk, too, but they're content to perch on the edge of the pond and pick at themselves most of the time. When I took out my dog, I saw a squirrel launch itself onto a tree and disappear into the branches, shaking the robins out of comfort and into the sky.

Some may call the city a concrete jungle, but I am not used to the suffocation of vines needing cut through. I am used to openness, to stretching sky and trees creating canopies that let in light through leaf gaps and the brush of the wind.

While I spent most of my time reconvening with home and my parents, I did not completely forget about my project. One thing that coming home always brings up is the non-linearity of time. The past presses up against the present and says hello each time. The sense of drowning it both what is, what has been, it comes to me here. Anne Carson brings this sense of memory, of time all collapsing in on itself, through a few devices in her text: the anachronisms, the jump from a place in the present time to a place in the past, a sense of the dream, a recollecting.

We have not moved since I was born, so this house has collected many moments. Like houses do, it has its own life and one that breathes again when I come back to it. Sometime this year, my parents will be selling the house and moving. It is a strange feeling, but I am embracing it. But I will miss the quiet, the place to withdraw, and how immediate the sense of the past is--how close it can come, how much it can feel just as alive as the present.

And yes, my dad did decide to grow a grapefruit tree in our living room.

The places between knowing and emotion

Tonight, a couple of friends and I watched the film The Last Unicorn, which is a childhood favorite of mine. I encountered in the watching and discussing of this film something that I am beginning to notice in my own re-reading of Anne Carson: the difference between allowing a piece of media to be an experience and analyzing that media.

When I am in the mode of experience, I am passive. I let in color, sound, light, and feel. The act is a bit like immersing oneself in water. You may retain a sense of self and an identity, but the focus is on the way that the media interacts with you on a level both superficial and deep. There is no conscious networking between these two aspects of oneself, they simply do--like waves rippling out to meet each other and stir further movement. It is not analytic, it is not focused on deconstructing the layers between the top and the bottom.

In analysis, the focus is on peeling each layer back to reveal something new and to unravel the inner lines and connections. To deconstruct the piece, one must take a step outside of the realm of feeling and movement. At least, that has always been how I perceived it--at a distance. By grappling with a topic and with issues that have evoked emotion within me, I am beginning to see where the distance lessens and can be both beautiful and distracting.

It is hard sometimes to slow down and not assume that the feeling is obvious and the meaning that hums down from skin to depths does not occur similarly for everyone. It is not a removal of oneself from the process, but an expansion and deepening of those stirring movements into vibrations that maybe make sense. The work only becomes more imbued with feeling and meaning the more I untangle those threads within it. I hope by the end of this project I can map those moments out for someone and show them that this work is meaningful.

"Caught in a motion that I don't want to stop"

Over the last week, I have dove back into Anne Carson's Plainwater, particularly, her first full "essay" in the section "The Anthropology of Water", titled "Kinds of Water: An Essay on the Road to Compostela." A dense and nuanced read, I am attempting here to piece out some particular moments in the text that I see hinting at the notion of an identity in flux as allowed by a liminal space.

[Post-writing note: I do not necessarily see this as a coherent whole. It needs a lot of tweaking and a lot more threading in of major concepts and a lot more background reading. This is just a very, very rough description and analysis of some ideas within "Kinds of Water" all very loosely tied together with the idea of liminality--which I will probably be supplementing with a reading of the "Dark Night of the Soul" as both a concept and a piece of work.]

To start, liminality is an anthropological concept that emerges in conversations of rites of passage. Carson describes herself pre-pilgrimage as though on the verge of a rite of passage herself: "I was a young, strong, stingy person of no particular gender" [1]. This description hints at someone at a threshold of transformation--or even in the beginnings of transformation. Often rites of passage include defining of gender--or full immersion into a particular gender, think 'manhood' rituals--and the movement into adult. This opens the space for the pilgrimage to exist within the moments between a start and a conclusion.

Although Carson uses the rite of passage framework, she plays with its boundaries. Instead of envisioning the neat and progressive narrative of self-growth as pre-pilgrimage, pilgrimage, post-pilgrimage, Carson presents her narrator as fully immersed in the state of betweenness--or, more accurately, liminality. The word liminality, as defined by Wikipedia [2], means, "the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete."

The entirety of Carson's narrative lives in this space and the narrator reveals this from the start. The first piece of "Kinds of Water" starts with the narrator staring out her window down to a river and waterfall where she sees something in the water, but cannot quite make out what it is. She believes it to be a dog and worries it is drowning, but at the same time she hesitates to name the moment as she watches people walk by and do not make any sign of noticing. She reveals distrust of her ability to to make meaning here: "I have come through countries, centuries of difficult sleep and hard riding and still I do not know the sense of things when I see it, when I stand with the pieces in my hands." [3] Whereas others move without notice, seem to be engaged in their tasks, she watches from the window and asks, "What is it others know?" [4] Carson invites the reader to engage in this nebulous state of unknowing, of fluidity, of questioning with the last remark in her first section: "Pilgrims were people who loved a good riddle." [5]

This sense of looseness of identity and, therefore, lack of knowledge and meaning-making appears also in the narrator's reflections on her traveling companion, "My Cid." The narrator takes on the role of the observer [6], watching My Cid and seeing in him the knowledge that she lacks. "Ahead of me walks a man who knows the things I want to know about God, about lovers' conversations," Carson writes, after a reflection on her own lack: "There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what appetite is." [7] The narrator desires to understand, but yet as she watches My Cid and attempts to understand by following him, she is only left with the "white dust puffing up to cover each step, left, right, left" [8]. She cannot learn what she wants to know from him, following him only leads to further obfuscation, further blending and confusion. All becomes lost in the white dust.

The confusion of meaning-making or knowing is not the only confusion in Carson's text. The liminal space also creates a fluid identity. Carson repeats throughout "Kinds of Water" the notion of animals riding on top of each other or animals entangled in each other. A sense of the confusion of self and other complicates the narrator's attempt to be an objective anthropologist. While the narrator watches My Cid walk before her, she realizes, "How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal. I know the animal. Does that mean I hand myself over?" [9] The act of being entangled requires the self to become part of another--it requires a fundamental giving in. Further in this section, titled "To Compostela, 23rd of July", the narrator describes a photograph of My Cid and his mother and a memory tied to it. During this description, the fragment "Half smile" appears. [10] This fragment appears frequently in the text [11] and is always attached to the narrator in response to My Cid. Here, while the employment could be similar as an interjection by the narrator, it appears more attached to the line that precedes it: "'Must get a hat,' [My Cid's mother] would say every time, bending her head." [12] In sharing My Cid's memory, the narrator has become an element within it and has become conflated with the image of his mother.

This entangling of identity and meaning, the multiplicity of meaning allowed in any single action, is also revealed in the narrator's meditation on the act of offering. Carson writes, "Flowers are banal between lovers but this is not that. Mine are much less an offering to My Cid than an entangling of him in an offering to the saint, which is in turn an entangling of the saint in an offering to God, as the pin snares the flower stalks and the hat gives occasion to the whole." [13] One action holds a multiplicity. Here, Carson unravels the implication(s) of action. She makes a similar remark on the relationship between the pilgrim and the road, where "[the road] asks only one thing. Which happens to be the one thing you long to give. You step forward...Nothing is left in you but desire for that perfect economy of action, using up the whole heart, no residue, no mistake: camino." [14] The act traveling is not just a movement forward, but an expression of love and abandon. It is an offering of oneself to the road, a relationship and entangling of one with it--the perfect slotting of [desire of the] beloved and [action of the] lover. While often the narrator remarks being confused about the language and meaning of things, here she can piece out clearly the multiplicity of meaning. The act of walking unfolds to reveal its oneness with the act of love.

Carson ultimately does not end this narrative of pilgrimage with the narrator in a state of post-pilgrimage. The coming to Santiago does not mark solely an admiration of the church, but in fact includes the explosion of the church with fireworks. The next day, the narrator and her fellow pilgrims stand "knee-deep in gold rubble." [15] Beyond the literal destruction of the perceived end point and destruction as a transformation (playing perhaps into themes of the "dark night of the soul" that is mentioned throughout the text), the narrator does not end in Santiago. She and My Cid move onward, "as no mountain ends at the top, so no pilgrim stops in Santiago...the road goes on. It goes west: Finisterre." [16]

Finisterre is described by My Cid, "there is nothing there except the end of the world." [17] When the narrator and My Cid get to Finnisterre, they walk into a fog that never seems to end and eventually decide to turn back. When they start heading back, the narrator has a moment when she realizes "we are utterly lost. Let me revise that. I am lost....No one is here but me. And there is no road." [18] Now stripped of the action (walking) and the relationships that are most familiar (My Cid and the road), that lead her onward to the perceived end of her journey, the narrator has fully immersed into the endless liminality. The next and last section of the text brings the narrator to the shore. Here she parallels the drowning dog from the beginning of the entire pilgrimage: "I have fallen at the edge of the water, knocking back and forth slightly in the force of the waves." [19] Above her, figures gather and speak over her, "What is it they are saying? Perhaps--no. Words never went on in me." [20] The hesitation and reaching for meaning-making, for understanding the words of others and their machinations, has ceased. The narrator abandons her reaching for construction, she feels fully, "Fear shakes me. As it sometimes will just when we are about to be handed over." [21]

By framing the pilgrimage within a liminality through the events of drowning, Carson plays out the truly suffocating, confusing, and uncertain limits of identity and meaning.

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[1] Anne Carson, Plainwater. (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1995): 123.
[2] I apologize for the use of Wikipedia. There is an article on rites of passage that I am going to cite when I end up discussing liminality in the paper, I just do not have access to it at the moment.
[3] Anne Carson, Plainwater, 124-125.
[4] Carson, Plainwater, 125.
[5] Carson, Plainwater, 125.
[6] "I am a pilgrim (not a novelist)" here Carson makes a claim about her ability to construct meaning. She is here not as a meaning-maker, not a narrative-constructor, but a pilgrim, someone in motion. Carson, Plainwater, 152.
[7] Carson, Plainwater, 143.
[8] Carson, Plainwater, 143.
[9] Carson, Plainwater, 175.
[10] Carson, Plainwater, 175.
[11] Carson, Plainwater, 185. Maybe not as prevalent as I imagined, but I will have to read through again more carefully.
[12] Carson, Plainwater, 176.
[13] Carson, Plainwater, 149.
[14] Carson, Plainwater, 154.
[15] Carson, Plainwater, 181.
[16] Carson, Plainwater, 183.
[17] Carson, Plainwater, 185.
[18] Carson, Plainwater, 186.
[19] Carson, Plainwater, 189.
[20] Carson, Plainwater, 189,
[21] Carson, Plainwater, 189.

Title of this blog comes from "Burning" by The Whitest Boy Alive.

In need of a copy of "Latin for Dummies"

Today, I had my chance to finally sit down with Abraham Ortelius's Parergon, the "accompanying work" to his world atlas. This addition contains what Peter Meurer calls "ancient, holy, and profane history." Maps include, but are not limited, to subjects such as the travels of Aeneas, Israel, and a drawing of the town (?) Daphne.

A majority of these maps are maps. They record the contemporaneous land masses with town or area names to match the period they are meant to discuss. Mountain ranges are drawn in, along with some rivers. To me, the most notable sight of rivers were in maps of Israel. In the map of Israel, Ortelius also wrote in the names of the tribes in the places that they were meant to have been. While the maps of Ancient Greece or the Roman Empire lacked borders of places, only pasting names over space, the map of Israel includes dashed lines to indicate borders. Given the religiously charged nature of Ortelius's time period, the mid-to-late 1500s, it may be fruitful to explore further why these marks are made.

Two of the pieces in the Parergon are drawings of the towns of Tempe and Daphne. These are not like the works of the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, which is a work by Georg Braun that Abraham Ortelius was keen on. Instead of a birds eye view or a panorama of a city, the "towns" of Tempe and Daphne are more like portraits of natural landscapes. While not realistic like the paintings we went to see in the Art Institute, the perspective bears similarity. Ortelius's drawings look at heavily forested areas that are dotted with small people, some laying around and eating, some running. There is little sense of civilization. Each drawing has a temple and the implication of a society somewhere in the distance, but the purpose of the drawing does not seem anthropological or cartographic. These drawings lay heavily in the realm of imagined landscapes and one of my secondary sources places them under the header of "paradises."

The one map that I actually wanted to look at, the journey of the Patriarch Abraham, was not included within this particular folder of the Parergon. I then noticed that it said it was an incomplete version, which explains the absence. I will be trying again tomorrow or the next day to come look at this map, which I may want to focus on.

By the end of looking at the Parergon, I had a headache. From looking at small print on a map, yes, but also because everything in this text is in Latin. I can't read Latin, I didn't try to read Latin, but I still had a headache by the end of the folder. When I came back to my room to trying and find a translation of the text, my google search pulled up absolutely nothing. It was only through digging around in the biography of a secondary source that I found a copy, but I honestly don't even know where to begin looking for it. However, it is vital for a work like this, where Ortelius includes written material on the back of his maps explaining something (what? I have no clue) about his work.

Further, I realized I desperately need to brush up on my Renaissance history, especially the Northern Renaissance, which never gets as much airtime as the Italian. The implications of historical atlases depend on something further than understanding the rise of Neoclassicism and the revival of those values. Abraham Ortelius was educated on antiquities, having been taught Greek and Latin during his youth. He collected ancient coins. It is fair to call him a humanist and, therefore, to make understandable his inclusion of material like the Parergon in his world atlas. However, many questions crop up around the work. Why did he include maps of Israel or the travels of Abraham? How were these Parergon maps used? Who read them? Did Spain appropriate these maps and their history? Did Spain or the royalty of Spain have any thoughts on it? How did Ortelius's own faith come into these maps, especially the sacred ones?

My research has drawn me a little further into some of these questions, or at least has opened possible doors to explore these thoughts more. We will see where it goes.

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Meurer, Peter. "Ortelius as the Father of Historical Cartography," In Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of His Death, 1598-1998. Edited by M. P. R. van den Broecke, P. C. J. van den Krogt, and Peter Meurer. Houten; HES, 1998.

Humorous Commentary: "School Begins"

Placed as the center comic of the January 1899 edition of Puck, a comedy publication, lays “School Begins.” This comic features Uncle Sam as a school teacher leaning over his desk to educate a row of uncomfortable and disgusted students wearing banners that title them, “Porto Rico” [sic], “Hawaii”, “Philippines”, and “Cuba.” The subtitle on this comic reads “Uncle Sam – Now children, you’ve got to learn these lessons whether you want to or not! But just take a look at the class ahead of you, and remember that, in a little while, you will feel as glad to be here as they are!” The children in the higher level class bear the name “Alaska”, “California”, and other states that the United States had conquered and assimilated into the country. An Asian boy stands in the doorway with a rice-paddy hat and a braid, suggesting China stood at the brink of a similar treatment. On the other side of the door, inside of the school building, a Native American man sat reading a book upside down. Washing a window behind Uncle Sam was a black man, though a clear caricature.

This comic presents the hand of American imperialism. Just as the English, Spanish, and French came into “unclaimed” North America with the intention of civilizing its natives, the US has fallen into the same tactic. America’s awareness of its own past comes into play with the quote hanging up in the back of the classroom: “England has governed her colonies whether they consented or not; by not waiting for their consent she has greatly advanced the world’s civilization.” While seeming to commend the British, this writing actually only furthers the next statement about the practices of the US: “The U.S. must govern its new territories with or without their consent until they can govern themselves.” This ‘lesson’ is the one at play between Uncle Sam and the new school children. Having taken these territories, it is now the US’s duty to educate and provide for these territories through the form of infrastructure and governing.

The benefit of the US’s education is seen in the difference of clothing and attitude between the new school children and the old. The new school children wear their native dress and have no shoes, while the older children are prim, proper, and wearing shoes. The new children appear disgruntled and unhappy, while the older children sit static and eyes downcast to their books. Although it seems cruel to take away the rights of these territories and impose US governing over them, it ultimately leads to the benefit of those territories.

This comic is right at home in the middle of Puck, a humor and satire magazine. The pages preceding the middle include other humorous comic strips and short satiric quips. This reveals the comedic nature of “School Begins.” It laughs at the backward logic of the chalkboard lesson and stresses the difference of the territories and ethnic groups from Uncle Sam via caricatures. The small comics on the pages surrounding “School Begins” also critique politics and the government. The particular stories do not immediately correlate to the issue of “School Begins” other than the letter presented as an accompanying piece.

Ultimately, “School Begins” is a humorous critique of the American imperialist policy enacted over their gathered territories near the turn of the century. It comments on the backwardness of the policy, especially in consideration to the American Revolution.

Humboldt Park

On Monday morning, I ventured out to Humboldt Park with two of my classmates, Lucy and Jake, and made a square through the area. Our task was to observe and try to find a resident to talk with. While we achieved the first task before the bus stopped at Kedzie and Division, the second half did not have quite a conventional answer. That is not to say that we did not speak with or, well, were talked to by anyone.

We made our way through a residential area first and I found myself somewhere seemingly familiar. There are a few kinds of residences in Chicago that I can recognize and Humboldt Park contains a fair amount of them. The first residential neighborhood contained the typical two- or three-story high houses that could be split into apartments or home one family with the typical black fences keeping their two- or three-inch separation a firm one. It was here that we found encountered our first hipster-dressed young adult pacing forward and then turning around and speed-walking her way to North Avenue. This encounter, or lack thereof, played into the game of observer-observed that we found ourselves engaged in throughout our walk.

When one begins down North Ave, it is impossible not to notice who dominates that side of Humboldt Park. Spanish presented itself almost uncontested—there were three Chinese restaurants on North Ave, however. From the markets to the abundant taquerias, to the tantalizing panaderia that I almost stopped for, to fresh-fruit neverias (apparently expanding further than the few in HumboldtPark), the Hispanic influence was clear.

The people who walked the streets, few on this particular Monday morning, did not give off the hurried indifference of the typical Gold Coast fare. Instead, they stared as much as we did and here I noticed that the act of observation is not, as the word may imply, a one-way street. People stared back, though they rarely spoke directly to us. A couple of younger looking men offered us the car that they were currently sitting in for around three hundred dollars, a fair price for a car on its way for repair. When one of us stopped to take a picture of old Coach advertisements being pasted on the side of a building, the past-er asked if we appreciated his artwork and directed us to look out for his work as we went further down North Avenue.

On the other side of town on Chicago, we encountered an enthusiastic rendition of a rap song that included dance moves that seemed appreciated by another man. Further down the same street, we heard the evangelical preaching of approaching doom. Was this better or worse than receiving a pamphlet about the terrors of marijuana that included a threat of hell while standing on the edge of Coe College’s campus? I think it is hard to give such experiences a binary treatment.

Beyond those who spoke to us, we were still noticed. As our eyes followed the turn of brick to store face to windows barred over, the eyes of those around us also noted us. Certainly a triad of white kids walking through the downtown of Humboldt with confused expressions directed at our smart phones and the occasional picture-taking was revealing our level of comfort there. Although I only ended up taking one photo, the sense of being the outsider struck me every time we stopped to check the map or paused for a photo. Moving as a group without purpose or direction felt alienating to me, like I could not quite delve into the experience of the place while observation asked me to take a step outside of the present moment.

The larger community of Humboldt Park seemed equally concerned with time, though perhaps in a different form. The demographic of Humboldt had clearly changed throughout its time as a neighborhood. Fritz Reuter’s statue near the park itself expressed an Easter Europe population, along with the very name Humboldt—from a German botanist. The alternative name of Kildare Ave was the Rose of Sharon. Along this very street a church announced sermons from Pastor Murphy. Though we had not seen any other signs of an Irish community in Humboldt Park, the structure suggested there either still was one, or this church and street remained as a sign of their passing influence.

While these older forms of architecture and naming remained as voices from a time passed, the current community of Humboldt Park also spoke. A church’s mural read ‘para la gente del futuro’, ‘for the people of the future.’ A daycare was also named this. These names suggested the voice of the community who viewed themselves as the people not of only the present, but also the future of the voice of Humboldt Park. Yet, this desire had its complications. The community of Humboldt Park was not only Hispanic or Puerto Rican, but also black. A mural we saw paved this image of the future, in which the Puerto Rican flag and the Pan-African flag faced each other over an image of children playing. The people of the future does not just include the voices of the Puerto Rican and Hispanic part of Humboldt, but also the black community and others that will come to this place. The remnants of the Eastern European immigrant population serve not just as reminders of their presence, but a potential future of the current community in Humboldt.

"oh God of progress have you degraded or forgot us?"

"And yet none of these patterns matter to human history until we ask how the people whose lives they touched understood their significance. By using landscape, giving names to it, and calling it home, people selected the features that mattered most to them, and drew their mental maps accordingly" (Cronon 25).

The passage above from William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis elicited irritation. I grew agitated over the words, my immediate state of mind was to deconstruct the narrative of human hubris. Nature does not become meaningful when hashed apart by the pen of categorization. I even brought up this quote in class with, probably, a scoffing indignation. While also wiping away of Native American history and presence, that is not the only thing that disgusted me about the sentiment. It was that humans subordinate the life of the physical world to their experience of it. Though Cronon spends time before this passage creating for us a history of the landscape from the Ice Age to its place before the expansion of Chicago, this passage seems to cover this earlier passage and make it invisible. That is a distant and meaningless aspect of the past, it seems to say, now here let us begin to pave the stones of history.

Yet, at the end of a weekend filled with conversation about the task of making meaning, I am feeling a little less angry with Cronon. History is an act of making meaning that resonates with a group of people. (Other animals also construct meaning, but this is not a class on animal behavior, so I will try to narrow my scope here.) History draws one from their present position and exposes to them the layers of experience. It also adds or supports a current symbolic order. The reason why the danger of the history written by the victor exists is because it creates a world where the symbology of the defeated is either appropriated by the victor or flattened (eliminated?). This may be a dual process.

My anger with Cronon was that his framing of history does subordinated/eliminate the importance of the natural world to that of human manipulation. Humans necessarily divine meaning through the act of experience and interplay between the internal and external world, true. Humans manipulate the external world to serve their needs and allow them to survive, also true. Yet. Here again, I am struggling with Cronon's worldview. The framing of this transition between the natural world and the Western manipulation of that world does not give equal meaning to both sides. Cronon's wording shoves the world pre-1833 into the realm of the unimportant, or the meaningless, as it only becomes meaningful when occupied by people (and people who matter, i.e. the United Statesians, to borrow a term.) Cronon supports a narrative (note to self: thinker further on this) of human (Western?) "progress" (Manifest Destiny?) through framing the discussion of the natural world as a stepping stone into futurity and the human "progress" that will overlay it. 

While perhaps more innocuous than my frustrations illustrate, Cronon's phrasing tripped me up. I cannot truly encompass the entirety of Cronon's thought here, nor the extent of it, but this particular quote made me think. It helped me, too, frame a way to understand my own worldview. Cronon's task was the advancement of the United States and how Chicago stood at the center of that, so his viewpoint was clear from that start. But, the above is always a fun exercise.

As Ian asked me to expand upon in my below post, this exercise is also a fundamental aspect of beginning to understand my task. The appropriation of meaning/the creation of meaning is a question close to any scholar. Fingers crossed that in my next post--well, the one after the analysis of the picture--I will have gotten a little more actual research done!

Subject line credit: Sufjan Steven's "Come On, Feel The Illinoise!"

Wait, research isn't throwing the torn up bits of one's notes up and watching them fall in no coherent order?

(Unfortunately, this is not the first time in my life that I have been compared to the Sibyl. It is the first time that I have compared myself to the Sibyl, so maybe that redeems it a bit. Also, discussing the Aeneid earlier did not help.)

My thoughts have not been one-tracked given the scattered nature of this week. I am often a single-minded person, I stubbornly adhere to one thing and refuse to stray from it even if it hinders me. That does not mean that I cannot think in a multi-layered way, but it often becomes a vertical process. This week has not been like that in any way. My mind has moved horizontally and vertically and diagonally. No day has kept my following the same process. I feel a bit like a cat pawing at different strings, but not quite grasping any of them. I am certain that as the semester continues on I will be able to draw my perspective in a little more tightly. For now, I am unashamed to admit my scatteredness.

So, this post will probably represent that. I apologize in advance.

First and foremost, I have decided to change my research topic! Surprise! While Jim Akerman presented to us a few maps and atlases on Thursday morning, I was introduced to the notion of the historical atlas. Now, I guess, this is not the most shocking thing. Textbooks contain maps of old civilizations. In class, we looked at a progression of history through the two maps of Africa. The idea of a map drawn in with old borders does not, perhaps, seem so shocking with these examples. However, this particular historical atlas from the Civitates orbis terrarum, a world atlas created in 1573, represents the beginning of this process. The concept of having a history, one worthy of map-creation, is beginning to rise in this period of humanism. While accounts of the past certainly have their forms--perhaps the Bible being one of the most popular--the creation of a map is something completely different. It is not a landscape of words, but a physical laying out of that world as described.

One of my first thoughts was a connection to the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Writers like Homer were not drawing upon current events for the content of their stories. These stories took place hundreds of years separate from Homer--it was his (their? Traveling bard theory!) reflection on events of the Bronze Age that shape the Iliad and the Odyssey. While these stories may not be fact, may not be history, the act of self-conscious imagining back to a distant time is reminiscent of the work of a historian. Not to mention that a few hundred years after Homer, Herodotus comes forward with his Histories, an actual attempt at creating history, though a contemporaneous one. A work very concerned with geography, the Histories lays out the landscape and the social identity of the "barbarian" groups surrounding the Greeks. In the time of Rome, the historian Livy also writes on the founding of Rome. The idea of writing history is not a foreign one, obviously, but the act of mapping it is.

The act of mapping something out and labeling it as a historical atlas assimilates (appropriates?) that land and the history attached to it into the order of the mapper. During the 16th century, Neoclassicism had one of its many heydays with the Renaissance. While perhaps more recognized through sculpture than much else, the Classics were accepted into the life of the elite and educated. Claiming Classics as their history, one could then draw authority from that place. If anyone is wondering who the 'they' are, well--I don't know. Yet. Probably Italians/Italic states. That is what research is for, right?

I am 99% sure that during the Middle Ages there came to be maps of the cosmological world, particularly of the heavens. If these maps were actual maps or just a written rendition, I am not sure. We know that Dante creates such a map in his Paradisio--as well as Inferno. In fact, the written description of the Inferno admits of a Classical influence. Dante's guide through hell is none other than our very familiar Virgil. The rivers of hell are Classical references, as well as those at the end of Purgatorio. It is not a stretch to say that these references have power. Though one can argue of their lesser importance, as placing them in hell subordinates them to the higher authority of Christianity. But, yes, this is still a written account and an account of an entirely imaginary landscape. While it reveals the importance of the Classics, it still is not quite what I am looking for.

So, what kind of difference in meaning emerges between written accounts and those of mapping? As I have not yet narrowed my research topic beyond a very excited historical atlases (!), this question may become more or less important as I move forward.

"Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?"

I began to write in my personal journal a bit earlier to reflect on my day in class. But as the whipping pace of new information began to slow, I found my trains of thought re-entering the first seminar session of the semester. So, I figured if I was going to think of the seminar anyway, I might as well make it the first post of my blog.

To be completely forthright, the topic of the Newberry Seminar was not the reason I decided to apply. I would have applied regardless of its material simply to have the experience that it offered. However, as I got ready to come to the program, I began to realize more and more that its topic actually did interest me. In fact, it interested me a lot. And its topic followed me around. In fact, it flew with me across the Atlantic to Greece.

During the last half of May I took a class that went to Greece, appropriately titled History as Archaeology. As expected, we spent the entirety of two weeks in a fast-paced exploration of Greece, its museums and archaeological sites. While my professor, an archaeologist herself, had drilled in our heads that the Ancient Greeks heavily tied their identities to their environment by framing her Ancient Greek History class in a phenomenological view, there is no lesson like climbing to the top of the acropolis in the Greek heat and watching the Parthenon cast its shadow over you. Or to watch the landscape pass by through a bus window as you came closer and closer to mountain top, where perched even further up on a layer of bricks, lies a temple overlooking its valleys. There is no feeling like seeing a sanctuary laid into mountain face, its steps winding you through half-broken treasuries to its oddly shaped temple where once a Pythia spoke obscurely to her visitors.

The seminar's topic lingered on my shoulder, it asked me to turn my head out from the glass panels of Athen's Acropolis museum and out into the city that looked back at it. How does geography become tied with identity? How does the placement of a temple amplify its significance? The placement of Hephaestus's temple, a god of crafting and pottery, above the craftsman's quarter was not a mistake. He was their god and as he looked over them, they gazed up to him.

While one may be able to achieve these sensations simply by reading an account of Pausanias, for me that experience could not be born from a text. The quote from Heart of Darkness above, goes on to capture something that goes hand-in-hand with this discussion of physical place and the individual: "It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams..." (pg. 24)

The immediacy cannot be captured in words, in grammatical play, in the periods of paragraphs. The intricacy eludes us. Yet, it impacts us. It molds us, just as it is molded by us. So, we attempt to construct for others a way to experience this world. Conrad does not end his story in these ellipses. He continues to write. We follow Marlow through the jungle, we grow claustrophobic with him in the narrow passage of the river, we feel the motion and breath of the heart of the darkness where Kurtz has sunken to illness. Perhaps some detail is lost. We do not know the pattern of the veins in the leaves that frame the woman's face as she emerges from the brush. We do not know the way the leaves sunk or resisted to Marlow's steps as he followed Kurtz's crawling through the jungle. We cannot share in the immediacy of the event, even the imaginary (or not so imagined? See tomorrow's discussion of King Leopold's Ghost) event, but that does not stop Conrad and every other author from laying out these moments for us.

Writers, thinkers, painters, poets, cartographers, scientists, scholars--these people present to us an interpretation of their immediacy of experience. Their identity may seem solid in their expressions, but it is quietly (or not so quietly) formed as they explore these aspects of life, as they encounter their environment and the people who occupy it.

Similarly, I am looking forward to watching myself and my peers begin to change shape throughout this experience. While the conversation unfolded today, everyone revealed a different perspective on the text and could articulate their points so as to allow others to build off of them. As a fan of class time, the whole discussion got me excited to come back for the next seminar.

Through this blog, I will try to unfold an experience. I am not sure what it will be yet, but here is to trying!